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Even after serving in multiple CFO roles and spending 10 years on Wall Street, Manish Sarin still marvels at the plus-size experience that he acquired in the mid-1990s when he worked for Price Waterhouse as a financial advisor in its Nairobi office in Kenya, East Africa.

At the time, Sarin recalls, an abundance of available funding from the World Bank and IMF was enticing growing numbers of state-owned business in the region to privatize their operations as a prelude to jump-starting their capital market strategies.

\u201cThese were businesses like steel mills, aluminum plants, car dealerships, and commercial banks\u2014for me, it was just an amazing introduction to how businesses work, what makes them successful or not successful, and how to actually evaluate businesses from a capitalistic perspective,\u201d explains Sarin, who reports that he was the most junior member of the East African privatization practice, a team of 10 people within PW\u2019s 100-employee Nairobi office.

Says Sarin: \u201cOur clients were really the World Bank and IMF\u2014we would go and work at state-owned businesses at their request and then prepare and present our analysis to both the World Bank and the national government.\u201d \xa0\xa0\xa0

Twenty years later, as Sarin prepared to open his first CFO chapter, some of those presentations undoubtedly came to mind as he began to formulate his own vision for the role and the broader business contexts that Wall Street now expects 21st-century finance leaders to deliver.

Along the way, Sarin tells us, he has learned that a broader perspective is being demanded not only by outside stakeholders.

\u201cA few years ago, a head of sales told me, \u2018You have great ideas, Manish, but you need to provide greater context and better explain why you are doing the things that you are doing,\u2019\u201d remarks Sarin, who says that he took the advice to heart and has found that adding more context has accelerated his relationship-building with different parts of the organization.

\u201cIf a CFO approaches the role from the perspective of occupying a finance swim lane, I think that this is a very narrow view of the role\u2014it has to be much broader, and you have to be thinking, \u2018the entire company and what is happening in every department are part of my concern,\u2019\u201d explains Sarin.\xa0 - Jack Sweeney